howto upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 (and newer) today (june 2011)

[Alan Pope]

On 23 June 2011 00:53, Gilles MISSONNIER <gimi at iap.fr> wrote:
> I should have done this a while ago but... here I am now, seems like
> that 9.04 is so old that it can't even upgrade itself...
>

When a release becomes "End Of Life" the repository is moved off the
main servers, so when you try to upgrade from an old non-supported
release to another non-supported release it all kinda goes a bit
wrong. We should fix this!

> update-manager -c
> says that 10.04.2 LTS is available,
> but it can't get it...
>

There is no direct upgrade path from 9.04 to 10.04.2 LTS. However you
do have a couple of options.

> could I just change the "jaunty" by "karmic"
> in the /etc/apt/sources.list ?
>

Yes, but also change the host name to be
http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ rather than http://archive.ubuntu.com/
or whatever mirror you have in there. Both 9.04 and 9.10 are on that
box. However 9.10 is also End Of Life so that doesn't get you much
further forward.

So another option is to get a 10.04 CD (or ISO downloaded and burned
to CD or put on a USB stick) and do an install over the top of your
9.04 install. However during the partitioning stage choose "manual"
and select the partition you want to install onto (don't make changes
to the partition layout) and ensure "Format" is _not_ ticked. This
will install 10.04 over the top of 9.04 and preserve your /home
directory. Note that anything _outside_ your home directory will be
lost, which includes manual changes in /etc, data in /var and locally
installed apps in /usr/local. This will get you to a supported LTS
release, which is better than being on an EOL release.

A further third option is to get an 11.04 CD (or ISO downloaded and
burned to CD or put on a USB stick) and install/upgrade using that.
That will get you to the latest version of Ubuntu.

Finally as others have suggested you could put a 9.10 CD in the drive
and upgrade using that, but I've never found that very reliable, and
as previously mentioned that still only gets you as far as another EOL
release.

Al.